from the bogus-threats dept

There are all sorts of bogus legal threats out there, but every so often you see ones that take the concept of the bogus legal threat to a new and more astounding level. I would argue that the following legal threat, sent to BoingBoing qualifies. On January 13th, BoingBoing received a cease & desist letter from the law firm of Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh, written by Jubin Niamehr (who appears to be the only attorney at the firm not to get his name in the law firm's name). The complaint against BoingBoing is almost too bizarre to be believed. Basically, the law firm represents a company named Academic Advantage. In 2009, Boingboing wrote a blog post that had absolutely nothing to do with the company Academic Advantage. However, it did use the phrase "academic advantage" in the title of a post called "Autism as an academic advantage."

Again, the post had absolutely nothing to do with the company Academic Advantage.

Then, way down in the comments, an anonymous commenter talked about his own experience with autism and academia. In it, that commenter notes that, in his opinion, college was "a scam." Once again, this commenter is not speaking about the company Academic Advantage at all. He is not calling the company Academic Advantage a scam.

So what happens? According to Niamehr, apparently representing the company Academic Advantage, somehow, this all adds up to a prima facie case of defamation against Academic Advantage:

It is clear there is no purpose to this web address but to falsely accuse the Academic Advantage of
being a scam or at least associating the Academic Advantage with a scam. There is absolutely no helpful
reason for the website to have the words "Academic," "Advantage" and "Scam" which leads me to
believe it was created for malicious purposes. Claiming that our client's tutoring services program is a
"SCAM" is prima facie defamation and designed to do nothing more than damage our client's reputation.

I would love to see this law firm go to court and try to defend the claim that the post on BoingBoing (which is actually quite interesting) was designed to do nothing more than damage Academic Advantage when absolutely nothing in the post or the comments is about the company Academic Advantage. Furthermore, of course, making this even more ridiculous, the "scam" part of it (which again, is not at all about the company Academic Advantage) was put there by a commenter, so even if this was defamatory -- which again, it cannot be, since it's not about the company -- then the law firm of Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh, and its partner Jubin Niamehr, should know that the site itself is protected from such charges by Section 230 of the CDA, since the "scam" claim would have come from a commenter. But, of course, you don't even need to get that far, since nothing on the page talks about the company in question.

One would hope that Lazar, Akiva & Yagoubzadeh did not charge the company Academic Advantage for the time it took to put together such a letter.

from the makes-sense dept

We've discussed a few times over the years how copyright gets in the way of academic work. Journals (who get all of their writing and reviewing totally for free) insist on holding the copyright for those works in many cases. I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they're forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights. That's bad for everyone.

The conventional rationale for copyright of written works, that copyright is needed to foster their creation, is seemingly of limited applicability to the academic domain. For in a world without copyright of academic writing, academics would still benefit from publishing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gaining scholarly esteem. Yet publishers would presumably have to impose fees on authors, because publishers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these publication fees would be borne by academics, their incentives to publish would be reduced. But if the publication fees would usually be paid by universities or grantors, the motive of academics to publish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actually increase) – suggesting that ending academic copyright would be socially desirable in view of the broad benefits of a copyright-free world. If so, the demise of academic copyright should be achieved by a change in law, for the 'open access' movement that effectively seeks this objective without modification of the law faces fundamental difficulties.

The whole paper is well worth reading, and it makes a very compelling case (admittedly, I'm already a strong believer in the harm done by copyright in many instances) as to why copyright makes no sense in the academic setting, and likely causes a lot more harm than good. Beyond showing why abolishing copyright on academic works wouldn't decrease output, it also suggests that it would lead to nuermous additional benefits as well, that come with more freedom in sharing ideas, which speeds further ideas and innovation. The last bit, suggesting why the "open access" movement isn't enough is also quite interesting. While I've always paid attention to the "open access" people, I hadn't given it too much thought. The paper though, does outline some key problems with the open access push as it stands today, and shows how the goals of the open access movement would be much better accomplished not through such a system, but in getting rid of copyright on academic research entirely.

from the editing-professor's-views dept

There are plenty of Wikipedia haters out there -- but they often seem to miss the point of the site. We've certainly heard of plenty of students who are told that they're not allowed to cite Wikipedia, which seems silly. As long as people recognize what the source is and how it's written, there's nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as one source among many. It appears that at least a few professors are figuring this out -- and one has taken the typical Wikipedian response to charges of incorrect data (that response being: well, if it's wrong, fix it!) to the next level. Rather than having students just research something using Wikipedia, University of Washington-Bothell professor Martha Groom has them write up a totally new Wikipedia article or substantially improve an old one. In other words, if you think that Wikipedia isn't very good, why not improve it? Not only is it probably a valuable exercise in learning how to present certain types of information, it helps the students have a better understanding of how Wikipedia content comes to be.